Construction Week.

This article reports that the meeting and convention business is on the decline, and cities should reconsider plans to build more convention and related hotel space, says a new report by the Brookings Institution. Over the past decade, annual public spending on convention centers has doubled to$ 2.4 billion and convention space has doubled since 1990, says author Heywood Sanders. Foster Wheeler Ltd., New Jersey, is taking a$ 76-million charge to earnings in the fourth quarter after a ruling by a New York state trial court that New York law, rather than New Jersey's, applies in a lawsuit over the allocation of liability for asbestos-related personal injury claims involving some of the firm's subsidiaries.